PERLRETUT
NAME DESCRIPTION Part 1: The basics Part 2: Power tools BUGS SEE ALSO AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT
perlretut - Perl regular expressions tutorial
This page provides a basic tutorial on understanding, creating and using regular expressions in Perl. It serves as a complement to the reference page on regular expressions perlre. Regular expressions are an integral part of the m//, s///, qr// and split operators and so this tutorial also overlaps with ``Regexp Quote-Like Operators in perlop and ``split in perlfunc.
Perl is widely renowned for excellence in text processing, and regular expressions are one of the big factors behind this fame. Perl regular expressions display an efficiency and flexibility unknown in most other computer languages. Mastering even the basics of regular expressions will allow you to manipulate text with surprising ease.
What is a regular expression? A regular expression is simply a string that describes a pattern. Patterns are in common use these days; examples are the patterns typed into a search engine to find web pages and the patterns used to list files in a directory, e.g., ls .txt or dir *.. In Perl, the patterns described by regular expressions are used to search strings, extract desired parts of strings, and to do search and replace operations.
Regular expressions have the undeserved reputation of being abstract and difficult to understand. Regular expressions are constructed using simple concepts like conditionals and loops and are no more difficult to understand than the corresponding if conditionals and while loops in the Perl language itself. In fact, the main challenge in learning regular expressions is just getting used to the terse notation used to express these concepts.
This tutorial flattens the learning curve by discussing regular expression concepts, along with their notation, one at a time and with many examples. The first part of the tutorial will progress from the simplest word searches to the basic regular expression concepts. If you master the first part, you will have all the tools needed to solve about 98% of your needs. The second part of the tutorial is for those comfortable with the basics and hungry for more power tools. It discusses the more advanced regular expression operators and introduces the latest cutting edge innovations in 5.6.0.
A note: to save time, 'regular expression' is often abbreviated as regexp or regex. Regexp is a more natural abbreviation than regex, but is harder to pronounce. The Perl pod documentation is evenly split on regexp vs regex; in Perl, there is more than one way to abbreviate it. We'll use regexp in this tutorial.
Simple word matching
The simplest regexp is simply a word, or more generally, a string of characters. A regexp consisting of a word matches any string that contains that word:
And finally, the // default delimiters for a match can be changed to arbitrary delimiters by putting an 'm' out front:
/World/, m!World!, and m{World} all represent the same thing. When, e.g., is used as a delimiter, the forward slash '/' becomes an ordinary character and can be used in a regexp without trouble.
Let's consider how different regexps would match :
The first regexp world doesn't match because regexps are case-sensitive. The second regexp matches because the substring 'o W' occurs in the string . The space character ' ' is treated like any other character in a regexp and is needed to match in this case. The lack of a space character is the reason the third regexp 'oW' doesn't match. The fourth regexp 'World ' doesn't match because there is a space at the end of the regexp, but not at the end of the string. The lesson here is that regexps must match a part of the string exactly in order for the statement to be true.
If a regexp matches in more than one place in the string, perl will always match at the earliest possible point in the string:
With respect to character matching, there are a few more points you need to know about. First of all, not all characters can be used 'as is' in a match. Some characters, called metacharacters, are reserved for use in regexp notation. The metacharacters are
{}[?()^$.*+?\
The significance of each of these will be explained in the rest of the tutorial, but for now, it is important only to know that a metacharacter can be matched by putting a backslash before it:
In the last regexp, the forward slash '/' is also backslashed, because it is used to delimit the regexp. This can lead to LTS (leaning toothpick syndrome), however, and it is often more readable to change delimiters.
The backslash character '' is a metacharacter
In addition to the metacharacters, there are some ASCII characters which don't have printable character equivalents and are instead represented by escape sequences. Common examples are t for a tab, n for a newline, r for a carriage return and a for a bell. If your string is better thought of as a sequence of arbitrary bytes, the octal escape sequence, e.g., 033, or hexadecimal escape sequence, e.g., x1B may be a more natural representation for your bytes. Here are some examples of escapes:
'housecat' = /$foo/; # matches 'cathouse' = /cat$foo/; # matches 'housecat' = /${foo}cat/; # matches
Babbage cabbage cabbages sabbath Sabbathize Sabbathizes sabbatical scabbard scabbards This program is easy to understand. #!/usr/bin/perl is the standard way to invoke a perl program from the shell. $regexp = shift; saves the first command line argument as the regexp to be used, leaving the rest of the command line arguments to be treated as files. while ( loops over all the lines in all the files. For each line, print if /$regexp/; prints the line if the regexp matches the line. In this line, both print and /$regexp/ use the default variable $_ implicitly.
With all of the regexps above, if the regexp matched anywhere in the string, it was considered a match. Sometimes, however, we'd like to specify where in the string the regexp should try to match. To do this, we would use the anchor metacharacters ^ and $. The anchor ^ means match at the beginning of the string and the anchor $ means match at the end of the string, or before a newline at the end of the string. Here is how they are used:
The second regexp doesn't match because ^ constrains keeper to match only at the beginning of the string, but has keeper starting in the middle. The third regexp does match, since the $ constrains keeper to match only at the end of the string.
When both ^ and $ are used at the same time, the regexp has to match both the beginning and the end of the string, i.e., the regexp matches the whole string. Consider
The first regexp doesn't match because the string has more to it than keep. Since the second regexp is exactly the string, it matches. Using both ^ and $ in a regexp forces the complete string to match, so it gives you complete control over which strings match and which don't. Suppose you are looking for a fellow named bert, off in a string by himself:
Of course, in the case of a literal string, one could just as easily use the string equivalence $string eq 'bert' and it would be more efficient. The ^...$ regexp really becomes useful when we add in the more powerful regexp tools below.
Using character classes
Although one can already do quite a lot with the literal string regexps above, we've only scratched the surface of regular expression technology. In this and subsequent sections we will introduce regexp concepts (and associated metacharacter notations) that will allow a regexp to not just represent a single character sequence, but a whole class of them.
One such concept is that of a character class. A character class allows a set of possible characters, rather than just a single character, to match at a particular point in a regexp. Character classes are denoted by brackets [...?, with the set of characters to be possibly
/[bcr?at/; # matches 'bat, 'cat', or 'rat' /item[0123456789?/; # matches 'item0' or ... or 'item9' In the last statement, even though 'c' is the first character in the class, 'a' matches because the first character position in the string is the earliest point at which the regexp can match.
This regexp displays a common task: perform a a case-insensitive match. Perl provides away of avoiding all those brackets by simply appending an 'i' to the end of the match. Then /[yY?[eE?[sS?/; can be rewritten as /yes/i;. The 'i' stands for case-insensitive and is an example of a modifier of the matching operation. We will meet other modifiers later in the tutorial.
We saw in the section above that there were ordinary characters, which represented themselves, and special characters, which needed a backslash \ to represent themselves. The same is true in a character class, but the sets of ordinary and special characters inside a character class are different than those outside a character class. The special characters for a character class are
end of a character class. $ is special because it denotes a scalar variable. \ is special because it is used in escape sequences, just like above. Here is how the special characters ]$\ are
$x = 'bcr'; /[$x?at/; # matches 'bat', 'cat', or 'rat' /[$x?at/; # matches '$at' or 'xat' /[\$x?at/; # matches 'at', 'bat, 'cat', or 'rat' The last two are a little tricky. in [$x?, the backslash protects the dollar sign, so the character class has two members $ and x. In [\$x?, the backslash is protected, so $x is treated as a variable and substituted in double quote fashion.
The special character '-' acts as a range operator within character classes, so that a contiguous set of characters can be written as a range. With ranges, the unwieldy [0123456789? and [abc...xyz? become the svelte [0-9? and [a-z?. Some examples are
/item[0-9?/; # matches 'item0' or ... or 'item9'
/[0-9bx-z?aa/; # matches '0aa', ..., '9aa',
/[0-9a-fA-F?/; # matches a hexadecimal digit /[0-9a-zA-Z_?/; # matches a If '-' is the first or last character in a character class, it is treated as an ordinary character; [-ab?, [ab-? and [a-b? are all equivalent.
The special character ^ in the first position of a character class denotes a negated character class, which matches any character but those in the brackets. Both [...? and [^...? must match a character, or the match fails. Then
/[^a?at/; # doesn't match 'aat' or 'at', but matches
/[^0-9?/; # matches a non-numeric character /[a^?at/; # matches 'aat' or '^at'; here '^' is ordinary Now, even [0-9? can be a bother the write multiple times, so in the interest of saving keystrokes and making regexps more readable, Perl has several abbreviations for common character classes:
d is a digit and represents [0-9?
s is a whitespace character and represents
lib/CachedMarkup.php (In template 'browse' < 'body' < 'html'):257: Error: Pure virtual
lib/CachedMarkup.php (In template 'browse' < 'body' < 'html'):257: Error: Pure virtual